I pulled a Don Draper once. Had to. Something about that combination of flight attendant and Southern accent makes you, almost preternaturally, turn on a twang of your own and, even if it's on a commuter flight back down to North Carolina for second semester of junior year, do your best 28-year-old. Of course, it helps if you're actually a businessman who can actually fulfill the other end of air travel's romance — the accidental dinner in your destination, followed by whatever black-and-white movies taught us should come next. My uncle did it, and found himself a wife. On last night's Season Three premiere of Mad Men, John Hamm's Draper did it (under the instant auspices of one "Bill Hofstadt"), and found himself his most fulfilling adulteress yet.

We've met several of these types on the show before, to varying degrees of moral ambiguity and sensitivity. But Shelly is a stereotype come divinely true — a stewardess, not a flight attendant, with a heart of gold (reads the paper, can't smoke in uniform, uses the phrase "hoot and a half"), and very much a product of the pre-politically correct era. ("I've flown a few times, but I've never actually seen a stewardess that game," Sal offers to Don after their first in-flight encounter. To which the knowing debaucher replies, "Really?")

More than that, Shelly is a product of what is already a season with enough sexual charge to match the show's anxiety as it charges further into the '60s: "Do you like?" she asks while stripping — really stripping — in Don's room. And Sunny Mabrey, the actress who wears the gloves, the wings, and the side curl with such nervous ease, is a product of the campy stewardess genre, having played one in Snakes on a Plane after taking her turn in the Species "franchise." This role could be for her what that Entourage threesome was for Malin Akerman. What's more, over dinner in Baltimore with the team from Sterling Cooper (under the auspices of Jimmy Hoffa's accountants), Shelly politely mentions that New York is her airline-route base, so here's hoping we get another glimpse. Then again, there's a little Draper in the oven, and Christina Hendricks is looking more tempting than ever. Some things are best left a mile high.